I could not keep my gravity, when after having desired him to
deliver such a message to the policeman as an angry man is apt to
convey, indicating, I am afraid, a wish, on my part, that the official
would remove to less comfortable quarters than Bernstadt, the host,
with all possible gravity replied, "Goot." There was no resisting this,
and I laughed heartily.

The passport was correct enough, and the gendarme, after listening to
sundry warm expostulations, delivered, not through the medium of the
host, but directly by myself, stammered out some excuse on the score of
duty, and hinted that they were obliged to be constantly on the alert,
in consequence of the frequent inundation of fugitive Poles into the
country. Alas, the poor Poles! Defeated in their attempt to free
themselves from the yoke of the stranger, and driven to seek, in exile,
the safety which is denied to them at home, they cannot find anywhere,
throughout continental Europe, a resting-place for the soles of their
feet. For even Saxony,--the child, a feeble one, doubtless,--but still
a child, of the revolutionary mania of 1830,--is afraid to afford an
asylum to men whose sole crime is, that they have struggled, or perhaps
pined only in secret, to restore to their native land its place among
the nations of Europe. I was not, of course, so imprudent as to take
any notice of the gendarme's observation; but I thought within myself,
that the government of a free country deserved little respect which
could permit itself to be dragooned into the persecution of a body of
men, from whom Saxony, at least, has sustained no injury.

The gendarme having departed, I returned to bed, and slept till six in
the morning. We then breakfasted, and a little before nine, arrived at
one of the most interesting places which the student of human nature
will find in all Germany. Hernhut, in every sense of the term, a
missionary settlement, offers to the eye of the curious and the
reflecting, a spectacle as striking as can well be conceived. Here is
no diversity of opinion on religious subjects, no indifference, real or
pretended, to religion itself, no postponement of duty to convenience,
no deference to police regulations which is not paid to a higher
principle. Religion is in Hernhut, what law and custom are elsewhere,
the main-spring of people's actions. They work and play, they associate
together, or dwell apart, they go out and come in, rise up, and lie
down; they perform eve